insulator testing

Regular and rigorous inspection of outdoor insulators is essential for uninterrupted power grid operation. Recent advances in computer vision enabled replacing conventional subjective, costly, and inefficient visual insulator inspection with automated diagnosis from unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) taken images. In this study, advanced computer vision algorithms, namely, family of YOLOv3 and YOLOv5 architectures, are trained and compared for classification of frequently encountered insulator mechanical faults from UAV images.